


Armistice

by zamwessell



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - World War I, M/M, Romance, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-11-01
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-25 14:33:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 15,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/271341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zamwessell/pseuds/zamwessell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1917. Craiglockhart, a mental hospital in Scotland. Erik Lehnsherr is a Siegfried Sassoon-esque World War I poet, and Charles Xavier (Wilfred Owen) is a fellow patient at the hospital who turns out to share more than Lehnsherr's gift for poetry. Everyone's still a mutant, but the origins of the mutations are a peculiar form of shellshock, and (given the dates) major hunks of folks' backstories are different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: What? You didn’t want a World War I poets AU? Well, don’t read this! This can be one of those things like camels doing ballet. You know the story of the camel who did ballet? It was terrible! And everyone was like, “Camel, what the eff, man?” and the camel’s like, “Hey, I do this for my own enjoyment!” I know I'm usually more of a straight-up smut fairy, but I just really wanted to try something different, and it may suck, in which case LA LA LA CAMELS LA LA.
> 
> That being said, I hear AUs are in these days, and I promise that there will be smut later, because hey, it’s me. And if you know WWI poets, maybe these parallels that have been eating me alive for ages have also been eating you alive! And if you don’t, there will be smut. Also Mac and Fass look so fetching in their ~~yes i know non-ww1~~ period uniforms that something had to happen. Maybe someone else already wrote this in which case I will kill you and marry you in some order that we can determine later.
> 
> Uh, there will also be World War I poetry. It won't be written at the time that the author actually wrote it, but if that's your biggest concern, and not the fact that Siegfried Sassoon can bend metal with his mind, you ought to consult someone.
> 
> Crossposted at LJ

_**Armistice (1/?)**_  
Title: Armistice  
Pairing: Erik/Charles  
Rating: PG-13 now, for violence and war? Later NC-17.  
Genre: WW1 AU  
Summary: 1917. Craiglockhart, a mental hospital in Scotland. Erik Lehnsherr is a Siegfried Sassoon-esque World War I poet, and Charles Xavier (Wilfred Owen) is a fellow patient at the hospital who turns out to share more than Lehnsherr's gift for poetry. Everyone's still a mutant, but the origins of the mutations are a peculiar form of shellshock, and (given the dates) major hunks of folks' backstories are different.  


Prologue  


  
**The Kiss**

TO these I turn, in these I trust—  
Brother Lead and Sister Steel.  
To his blind power I make appeal,  
I guard her beauty clean from rust.  
    
He spins and burns and loves the air,  
And splits a skull to win my praise;  
But up the nobly marching days  
She glitters naked, cold and fair.  
   
Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this:  
That in good fury he may feel  
The body where he sets his heel  
Quail from your downward darting kiss.  
 (Siegfried Sassoon, 1918)

   
There was a hole in the sky.  
   
Erik went stumbling along the bottom of the trench, half-drunk on the haze of battle, Tommy’s bulk warm and definite in front of him like the lowest note in a piece of music, giving solidity to the rest. Tommy always had that effect on him; soothing and calm as the clasp of Tommy's large warm hand, his puzzled lop-sided grin.

 _"Too much Greek, Lehnsherr," Tommy said. "Write me something I can send the old girl."  
"Hilda?"  
"That's the one."  
Erik nodded, glad at the contact of their shoulders through the sturdy trench coats, carefully erased Tommy's name and penciled in HILDA, grimacing a little, and said, "How's this?"  
Tommy listened to him read, eyes shut. "Magic, Lehnsherr," he said. "That's the real stuff. Just like mother makes it."  
"Your mother's a poet?"_   
_"Yours en't?"_

Over the top.  
   
A whizzbang shrilled overhead, tearing a bright rent in the smoky air. The men lumbered along in their helmets, moving sullenly forward. He had lost all sense of autonomy. Footsteps followed footsteps. He was nothing now – a nub of instinct, the raw beastly desperate need to survive. The sky was alive with light.

Fritz knew they were coming. The clatter of deathly wings, the shrill screaming of hell-cats, bright flash of the artillery. Darkness and chaos, and then a shrill sudden scream, as though some malign physician were probing into the choking fog to find a nerve of pain.  
   
They were on the lip of the German trench.  
   
The wire wasn’t cut. He stared at it. It was a definite obstacle, emerging like a familiar word in a soup of strange consonants and vowels. Someone was shouting something. It was impossible to formulate a plan. Survive. Lie down. Survive. No hole in the wire. Don’t try to – Life clawed at him desperately. Get down. Get down. He flung himself into the dust in time to see Tommy attempt the wire.  
   
“No!” he shouted.  
   
Tommy heard nothing. The world seemed to slow to a crawl.  
   
He was not accustomed to praying. This desperation cut deeper than prayer. It felt as though his mind were trying to slip the confines of his skull.  
   
One step. Another. Half-way through.  
   
A shrieking through the air. The shell missed but illuminated them like a flash-bulb; Tommy’s silhouette against the wire, cut out from the dark material of the night with the shell’s bright scissors. Sullen thud of lead kissing flesh. Tommy’s head lolled to the side.  
   
Erik did not realize that he was screaming.  
   
Around him, the world seemed to inhale. Had to get him down. Had to. Had to. The air had altered. This was an atmosphere that only he could breathe; his senses sharpened, sharpened to the point of pain, sharpened past the point of pain to pinprick awareness stretching across the air of the body in the wire, the wire in the body – the wire –  
   
He could feel the wire.  
   
He pulled. Tore. Suddenly the wire unspooled itself, stretched towards him, hooks retracting – _beaten into ploughshares_ – letting the body fall, senseless and heavy – hooks extending, _beaten into swords_ \-- and a tornado of metal burst along the line, catching up bodies and squeezing, choking them – now snake, now whip, now whirlwind again – and flinging them down –  
   
It was impossible. It was happening. That was this war all over. Now he would destroy the world. Tommy was gone and he would destroy the world.  
   
Men were running and screaming, whites of their eyes flashing like cattle.  
   
Another flash. Erik knelt beside Tommy and fumbled for his tags. The metal clung to his hand.

[Chapter 1](http://zamwessell.livejournal.com/9777.html)


	2. Armistice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 1917\. Craiglockhart, a mental hospital in Scotland. Erik Lehnsherr is a Siegfried Sassoon-esque World War 1 poet, and Charles Xavier (Wilfred Owen) is a fellow patient at the hospital who turns out to share more than Lehnsherr's gift for poetry. Everyone's still a mutant, but the origins of the mutations are a peculiar form of shellshock, and (given the dates) major hunks of folks' backstories are different.

_**Armistice (2/?)**_  
Title: Armistice  
Pairing: Erik/Charles  
Rating: PG-13 now, for violence and war? Later NC-17.  
Genre: WW1 AU  
Summary: 1917. Craiglockhart, a mental hospital in Scotland. Erik Lehnsherr is a Siegfried Sassoon-esque World War 1 poet, and Charles Xavier (Wilfred Owen) is a fellow patient at the hospital who turns out to share more than Lehnsherr's gift for poetry. Everyone's still a mutant, but the origins of the mutations are a peculiar form of shellshock, and (given the dates) major hunks of folks' backstories are different.  
[Prologue](http://zamwessell.livejournal.com/9628.html)

“I did that,” Erik said. His voice was still shaking. He had only been in camp an hour. The dogtags hummed in his thigh pocket.

“Then do it,” Graves said. Robert Graves, a few years younger than he, stubborn, with the same – unspecified unmanly inclinations, blunt nose, determined frown, too much prose in the boy, but by far the best company to be found in the Fusiliers. 

“I did that,” Erik said again. The storm of wire unrolled again behind his eyelids.

“You’re crazy,” Graves said, prosaic grey eyes narrowing.

“I’m not.”

“All right, you’re not.” Graves sounded as though he were trying to calm a rabid dog. “All right, Lehnsherr. What do you want me to say?”

“I did it. I did that."

“All right.”

The words shattered on the ground in front of them like glass bubbles. “You don’t believe me.”

Graves frowned. He did not meet Erik’s eyes. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

“You think my nerves are worn down. I’ll show you.”

“Erik,” Graves said, cribbing a line from Chaucer. “It bringeth rather bale than boot.”

“Hm.” It was the metal, he thought. It was only the metal that moved. He unpinned the silver cross from his lapel and stared at it.

“Lehnsherr, what in God’s name –”

Bend, Erik thought. Bend. Show him. Show him I’m not mad.

The cross hung limp and stubborn as an unbidden thought, dangling useless off its little ribbon. He strained, teeth gritting together, felt the blood rushing to his face. It felt like trying to move a mountain. How did God manage it?

“Erik,” Graves said, looking more frightened than angry, still not meeting his eyes. Erik sensed that he was trying to be delicate. “Remember before Corporal Shaw went off his rocker? He kept telling us he could catch grenades.”

“What if he could?” Erik asked.

“You need a rest. You’re getting frayed. I’m going to talk to the MO.”

“I’m not shell-shocked, Graves.”

“Lehnsherr please stop it. All right? You have a poetic imagination. Which generally I am the first to appreciate. But you keep talking like this and—tearing off your medals and – good God, man, you’ll be lucky if they send you off to company Q. You’ll get court-martialed.”

Graves’ hand clapped his shoulder. The touch seemed somehow dissociated from the man. Then Graves bent and whispered, “I know you’re taking it hard, Erik. About Tommy. So’m I. But there’s no sense in –”

“Of course. No sense.”

The grey bundle of Graves moved off, back among the tents.

\--

A few days later he was on the boat out of France, back to Blighty, hospital-bound. Craiglockhart. Loony-bin. Contents: discarded ruck of men. Men who screamed in their sleep.Handful of conchies just frayed enough to avoid court-martial. And Erik Lehnsherr, captain of the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

The injustice of it made him angry. Tommy still lingered behind his eyes, stretched out in benediction or malediction on the wire, and he was on a train, to safety. Safety. Craiglockhart. The words had a sick taste like blood in his mouth. He reached into his pocket and found that Tommy’s tags were pressed flat against the fabric of his shirt, straining towards his chest almost like a magnet.

Not mad, he reassured himself.

\--

Craiglockhart had been a castle, once. It looked more like a prison. There was an antiseptic smell in the hallways.

He was assigned Dr. Rivers. Within moments of their first interview Dr. Rivers produced a copy of his volume of poems and he dutifully signed it, smiled mechanically. Rivers murmured apologetically about the circumstances of their meeting and they began very decorously working long loops around any possible interesting topics. The conversation reminded him of a stroll around the manicured grounds of an English  
country house. There were monsters in the woods beyond and monsters in the house within, haunting the attics and the cellars, but they would not touch on them. They would continue to rove around the house, commenting on the weather. Only once did Rivers allude to what Graves had said, mentioned Tommy, and then only in the context of the types of love that war ought to encourage, and Erik tried not to roll his eyes.

Soon they began strolling around the grounds quite literally, Rivers tapping the ground with his stick, pointing out the varieties of plants. Botany always had struck Erik as a way of extracting the poetry from plants; to give a thing its right name, some said, was the whole art of poetry, but nothing’s right name was Aspergillus.

He amused himself by remembering lines of Shakespeare. _There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me._ Always a sign of insanity, Erik thought, to go about naming plants.

He began writing again. None of it was good. He poured it all into the fire.

Rivers could do nothing about the nightmares. In the nightmares he was sinking deeper and deeper into the trench and strange soldiers with Tommy's face, distorted red and blue grotesques, were treading lead-heavy on his head. He awoke choking and gasping and sometimes the bedframe was bent.

\--

He had managed to establish hegemony at the chess board in the smoking room.

“Give over,” the others said. “Let the rest of us play.”

“I will if you beat me,” Erik answered.

Erik beat the first David easily. And then the game began to be played in earnest. He was a formidable Goliath, he felt, mowing down pawns and eviscerating their tiny ivory armies. Undefeated as yet.

“I’ll try,” mumbled a new arrival, bespectacled and choking on his words, never quite making eye contact. McCoy. Erik was uncertain how exactly he’d come unscrewed. It didn't look as though it had taken much. He seemed infernally nervous.

When Erik waited for McCoy’s next move he felt eyes watching him. He glanced up. Sitting at the far end of the smoking room, as distant as possible from the victrola that was coughing out “Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag,” a short dark-haired young man sat reading intently.

“Who’s that?” Erik asked. The young man’s eyes flew back down to his book. He turned the pages impossibly fast.

“New arrival,” McCoy said. “He’s the lot after mine. Loyola, or something.”

“Check,” Erik said.  
   
“It’s a difficult case, I heard the nurses say,” one of the spectators said. “Sometimes they keep him in for night observation. I hear him walk past in the hallway.”

Erik glanced at him again. Xavier – bowed over the book -- didn’t look a difficult case. Soft brown hair; he looked well-nourished, as though he’d been born with the deed to something clutched in his tiny hand. What was a near-boy like that doing at Craiglockhart? What was a boy like  
that doing at war?

“Checkmate,” McCoy said, suddenly, and Erik cursed himself.

\--

At first when he heard the tap on his door Erik thought he was imagining it. It was one of his bad days. He had just sent Dr. Rivers packing. He had been hearing imaginary shelling all afternoon. The worst part was knowing that it was imaginary shelling. He had been trying to write. Sometimes he nodded asleep at the desk and mad-eyed, pain-blind horses reared up in his vision and he started awake.

He had only written two lines and both of them were lousy.

The knock sounded again.

“Captain Lehnsherr?” the voice said. It was not a voice he’d heard before. The accent sounded well-bred. It was a bit more musical than most voices in Craiglockhart. Erik supposed it was only logical that everyone there sounded faintly out of tune. They wouldn’t be there if something hadn’t snapped.

“I’m indisposed,” Erik said.  
   
He crumpled the poem up and tossed it at the bin. Miss. For a moment he contemplated crumpling the pen up as well. But the pen steadily refused to oblige. Metal was recalcitrant of late. Perhaps he had imagined the whole incident.

He must get used to this again. He must get used to being polite to other people, he thought. He must stop scaring them. Ivor Gurney, he’d read, never quite pulled himself out of the trenches.

“Did wonders for his poetry,” he said, then realized he’d said it aloud.

Again he tried to crumple the pen. Again nothing.

Perhaps Graves was right after all.

He frowned down at the page. Then he scrawled:

 _Do they matter, those dreams from the pit?  
You can drink and forget and be glad  
And people won’t say that you’re mad_

He heard footsteps receding down the hall. The knock had been real, at least.

 _For they’ll know that you’ve fought for your country  
And no one will worry a bit._


	3. Chapter 3

The nightmares were getting worse. For the past four nights Erik had been walking barefoot across a ledge of ice, with a growing terror that there was something horrible lurking beneath it. Don’t look down, he told himself. Don’t look under the ice. Keep moving. The not looking made it worse. Tonight he had made it almost halfway across before looking down, and when he looked down he had seen a thing almost like himself, lips frozen blue, walking a mirror path beneath the ice. The thing met his gaze with eyes swollen and wetly strange like the eyes of a drowned man. Then the ice began to crack.

He started awake, panting in terror. The bedstead behind him was bending and shifting and he could not get it to stop. He tried breathing. Control. Control. Make it obey you. But all he could feel was the pounding of his terror and the searing cold pain of the nightmare ice.

Finally it subsided. He lay in silence, panting, terrified.

In a room down the hall, he heard a scream.

Idly he wondered who it might be. It was a pure animal sound of terror.

He clambered heavily out of bed and turned on the lamp and tried to write. Nothing seemed to stick. The words looked like insects speared by his pen and left wriggling on the page.

Finally he stared at the pen. He tried to feel the metal, the curious clarification of the atmosphere around it, the hush of it.

Nothing.

That day over breakfast Rivers asked how he was doing. Coming from him the question did not sound like a form of politeness.

He told him the dream. For a moment he toyed with telling the man about the bedstead. He felt queerly certain that Rivers would not believe it, had a sudden picture of the man shaking his head and scrawling something on a clipboard. If Graves had not believed there was no reason to think the doctor would.

“Are you accustomed to nightmares?” Rivers asked.

“I grew up in the countryside,” Erik said. “I had a persistent nightmare about Lady Catherine of Wuthering Heights rapping at my bedroom window.”

Rivers grinned.

“Sounds silly now,” Erik said. He neatly decapitated his boiled egg with a swat of the spoon. “Horses helped. I’d wander to the stables and stand listening to them shuffle about in their sleep and breathe. Something solid about it I always found reassuring.” He neglected to mention the stable boy who for some time had been equally reassuring.

“Hardly an option here, I’m afraid,” Rivers said.

“Suppose not,” Erik said.

Rivers frowned. “Find me the next time,” he muttered. “I’m awake, generally. Going the rounds. Last night Summers managed to set his bed-linens on fire.”

“Summers?” Erik asked.

Rivers pointed down the table at a fair-haired boy who was staring fixedly off into space. Next to him sat the new arrival with dark hair. He seemed to be trying to induce Summers to eat a few spoonfuls of lumpy porridge.

A book was open on the table next to him and Erik wondered what book it was. No one else here seemed to read – not for pleasure, at any rate, only for want of anything more exciting to do, and then only cheap disreputable paperbacks. This couldn’t be one of those – one wouldn’t bring it to breakfast if --

Rivers was saying something. He nodded and tried to look as though he had been paying attention.

\--

Erik sat at his desk. He had given up all pretext of trying to write and was simply trying to bend the pen. Nothing was happening. He had no idea how to find the muscle again, and he felt as though he were straining everything else in the process. It was giving him a headache.

Suddenly there was a knock.

He waited in silence.

There was another knock.

Then: “I don’t mean to intrude,” a voice said, “only I heard you were here and I couldn’t have forgiven myself if I didn’t come congratulate the author of the Old Huntsman.”

“I’d hardly call failing to congratulate me on the Old Huntsman an unforgivable offense,” Erik said, but he got slowly up from the desk and opened the door. It was the new arrival. Contemplated at close range, the man standing at the door was nearly a head shorter and the first adjective that sprang to mind was _pretty_ , in spite of the hard angles that the uniform was trying to enforce, and his whole face lit up under unruly soft brown hair when he caught sight of Erik. Erik noticed with some alarm that he was holding three copies of The Old Huntsman under one arm.

The young man noticed the look and laughed, propitiatingly. His eyes were startlingly blue. “I’m sorry. I am absolutely positive that no words strike more terror into your heart than, ‘Here we are at the loony bin together and I’ve got three of your books.’”

“Bull’s-eye,” Erik said. His voice was level. “So you liked The Old Huntsman.”

"Adored."

"Were you reading it at breakfast?" Erik asked.

“I was working up the nerve to--” The stranger frowned and stopped abruptly. “I’m sorry if I’m interrupting you on a day when you’d prefer no one interrupted you, least of all some aspiring scribbler who is going about this all wrong but thought you merited congratulations and wanted to say that you’re not the only poet in the place, in case you wanted someone to bandy lines with or – God, I sound dashed silly, like it’s tennis, I can go rehearse this speech again.”

“You’ve been rehearsing it?”

The newcomer laughed ruefully.

“What’s your name?” Erik asked, holding the door open.

“You don’t mind?” He extended a hand. The books tumbled out from under his arm. “Xavier. Charles Xavier.” Erik bent to help pick them up. The boy grinned at him.

They walked in and he sat down at the desk. Xavier perched on the edge of his bed. He had the sense that if Xavier started talking again he might not be able to stop.

“Shall I endorse these?” Erik said. Xavier nodded. “To you?”

“One’s for my mother but I haven’t decided which yet, so, to me.”

“Xavier spelled the usual way?” Erik asked, mouth quirking upwards a little.

“Yes, like the saint. Although he’s not family.”

“Saints seldom are.” Erik began lettering out the dedication: “To Charles Francis Xavier (no relation to the saint.)”

“That one won’t go to my mother,” Xavier said, leaning nearer to watch him write. “Quite legible. How incredible! Mine’s scarcely legible; I have to print it all in block capitals if I want anyone else to be able to read it. Mother said bad handwriting was a sign of genius but I’m inclined to think she was humoring me and figured that if she couldn’t read a word of it that was the safest presumption.”

“It’s generally a safe presumption,” Erik said. “You ought to see H. G. Wells’ handwriting.”

“H. G. Wells?” Xavier perked, instantly.

“Illegible. And pink.” Erik gestured to the dresser. “I had a letter from him yesterday. See if you can make any of it out.”

Xavier hopped up and picked the letter off the dresser. “It is pink,” he said, after a moment. “I thought that was a way of referring to his epistolary style.”

“Like purple?”

Xavier chuckled. The chuckle sounded older than the boy looked. “You’re sure I can – nothing of a – personal nature?”

“From H. G. Wells?” Erik shuddered involuntarily. “No, mainly about something he’s ragging me to read called The Invisible King. Except for the illegible bits.”

Erik watched him read, scanning the letters impossibly fast.

“I don’t think this is a word, I think it’s just a drawing of a porcupine,” Xavier said at length.

“Which?” Erik stood up and squinted over his shoulder.

“That,” Xavier said, running his thumb over it. “At least it doesn’t look like anything else to me.”

“It looks more like a – dog that’s had a run-in with a porcupine.”

“Possibly a mutated echidna.” Xavier squinted at it, brow furrowing. “If this is always what his writing’s like I think the editor deserves most of the credit for The Invisible Man.”

“I am supposed to reply to him,” Erik said. “Right now I have made some very general remarks, mainly pertaining to the weather.”

“Why don’t you just cover the paper in noughts and crosses?”

“He might take that as an offense.” Erik sat back down at the desk and finished the last dedication. “Or worse, an indication that I belong here.”

Xavier stiffened a little.

“You don’t?” Xavier asked.

“I’m completely sane,” Erik said. “But I suppose everyone says that. In fact more likely if you aren’t sane. Present company excluded, I’m sure,” he added, feeling suddenly that he was talking too much. Xavier was giving him an odd appraising look. Erik studied his face again, more carefully. Xavier was pale and younger-looking and there was something a little frightened in those wide cool blue eyes, like ice beginning to form on the edge of a pool. There was only the faintest hint of stubble. Xavier’s lips were softer and redder than they had any right to be.

He wished he hadn’t noticed that.

"At any rate you look sane," he finished, somewhat lamely.

“There’s no need to flatter me,” Xavier said, looking momentarily puzzled, then picking up the letter again. “Let me have another go, I’ll bet I can see what he’s asking.”

Erik tried not to look at him. Dr. Rivers had been trying to warn him about these things. They had spoken of it in veiled terms, mainly borrowed from the Greek. That was the only untouched subject they’d managed to hit upon. Rivers thought it an expense of spirit in a waste of shame. No, that was another poem, about a different vice. One of the things about the war was that all the poetry Erik had memorized had turned into a dreadful hash. Marlowe kept bleeding into Tennyson in most unfortunate ways.

Charles chuckled. “Well we’ve certainly made a hash of the past in every other way possible,” he said, almost as though he’d heard him.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I thought you’d said something,” Xavier muttered. _Shit_ , Erik heard. He was almost positive Xavier’s lips hadn’t moved. At the thought his head began aching again. He shut his eyes and ran a hand through his hair.

“Well. Pleasure making your acquaintance,” he said.

Xavier looked at him. “I quite understand,” he said. “I hope I haven’t disturbed you.” His lips parted as though he were going to say something else. Erik tried to keep himself from staring at those lips. Xavier wasn’t blushing – _I wonder what it takes to make him blush._ The boy looked frustratingly civilized. Obscene pictures began stirring to life at the edges of his mind. _I bet he'd blush if he saw what I'm imagining,_ Erik thought, _but thank God the human mind isn’t set up like that._

For no reason that Erik could see, Xavier chuckled.

Since arriving at Craiglockhart Erik’s thoughts had turned relentlessly to sex. He supposed it was the absence of battle. Battle at least brought relief. And in battle there was Tommy – never returning the affection, but aware of it, in his stodgy hesitant way. Occasionally he had permitted Erik to clasp his hand. Once the clasp had threatened to become something else and Tommy had pulled away, face clouding, suddenly sheepish. Graves had had similar luck. It had brought them together. The bitter fraternity of rivals, Erik thought.

But Xavier was nothing like Tommy. He had clean hands. Oxford, he looks like an Oxonian or – one of the better public schools, at any rate, shunted into the officer corps when war came. Erik felt positive that he could break him, that he needed breaking. War was adamantly ugly and there was nothing ugly about Xavier yet; he still looked helplessly young, somehow cheerful, and Erik had a violent desire to spread Xavier’s legs and grasp him by the waist and thrust him down onto his cock until Xavier’s head lolled back in ecstasy and the boy was his, marked, claimed, taken, gasping his name out of that pretty mouth –

Xavier shuffled toward the door. “Thank you for the dedications,” he murmured. His voice was oddly rough.

Instantly the imagining ebbed. With Xavier gone he noticed that the room was cold.  



	4. Chapter 4

That night the nightmare came again and he didn’t look down. Tommy stood halfway across the ledge of ice, always half a step farther the closer he came, and Erik found himself remembering some faulty logic he’d learned at school about Achilles racing a tortoise. “Every time Achilles reaches the spot where the tortoise was, the tortoise has already moved, and as a consequence the tortoise always wins.” He couldn’t remember quite why that was wrong.  
   
He didn’t look down but he could feel something tugging at his ankle. It was a cold clammy awful grip and he felt his foot fuse to the ice. Then Tommy’s figure turned.  
   
It wasn’t Tommy’s face. It was distorted and bloated, the face of a drowned man days after drowning, and he tried desperately to replace it with the familiar visage, but the grotesque mask of horror seemed to swell to swallow everything else, and every time he called up a memory of Tommy it was with that hideous face, grinning at him across the trench or over a tin of meat or --  
   
The ice burned into his foot like fire, freezing indistinguishable from burning, and it was the sharp pain, cutting into his ankle, that woke him.  
   
Behind him, the bedstead was tying itself into a knot. He had to get out of there. _Find Rivers,_ he thought. _Find Rivers._  
   
He barreled down the hallway, still feeling the twisting metal behind him, unable to control it. It was sharp and painful as an infant’s new tooth.  
   
He nearly collided with Rivers coming around the corner in a corridor.  
   
“Erik,” Dr. Rivers said. His voice had that round and definite reassuring tone of a man trying to sound more confident than he feels. Erik sensed it.  
   
“Dr. Rivers,” he said. Suddenly the futility of trying to explain it washed over him.  
   
“Nightmares?” Rivers asked.  
   
Erik nodded. He fell into step with him without saying anything else. There was no good talking. It all felt curiously unreal. Perhaps this was simply another nightmare. Rivers wasn’t halfway so real as a horse.  
   
“I fear I’m a poor substitute for your stables,” Rivers said at last. “Would it help if we talked?”  
   
Erik shook his head. There was a silence. Their feet on the floorboards sounded loud as kettle-drums. “I’m going back to bed,” he said.  
   
\--  
   
The knock that morning came as a positive relief. He had been expecting it without knowing why.  
   
“Xavier?” he yelled, getting up from the desk.  
   
“I’m afraid so,” the voice said.  
   
Then he’d opened the door and Xavier came practically bounding in, far too energetic for so early. “I’m only here because I think I puzzled out what Wells meant with that infernal porcupine of his. If you haven’t already replied, that is. Also I’m starting a literary magazine here for the convalescents.”  
   
“Optimistic term,” Erik said. “Convalescent. It implies more progress than some of these are capable of, I’m afraid.”  
   
“I wouldn’t expect a man who writes like you to give them up so soon,” Xavier said, pursing his lips.  
   
“Wrote,” Erik said. “I’m not having any luck. I think my lyre was damaged in shipping.”  
   
Xavier looked almost insulted. “Don’t say that,” he muttered. “You’re the best we’ve got. If you don’t say it it simply won’t be said, and that’ll be a terrible waste as far as the world is concerned.”  
   
Erik half-laughed.  
   
“You can’t let yourself stop so easily. Write anything. Write something dreadful and I’ll put it in the Hydra.”  
   
“Who’s the Hydra?”  
   
“That’s the magazine. For the convalescents.”  
   
“I’ll write something awful about bullets and syph and death,” Erik said. “And then your little magazine will be shuttered.”  
   
“I’m afraid you can’t do that, actually,” Xavier said. “They’d prefer we didn’t talk about the war.”  
   
“They?”  
   
“Rivers doesn’t mind. But they’d prefer we limited ourselves to,” Xavier’s mouth quirked up into an ironic smile. Erik felt himself stare at it just a moment too long -- “classical themes.”  
   
“Classical themes!” Erik half-snorted. “What more classical theme is there?”  
   
“That’s what I asked. They suggested,” Xavier looked as though he were having difficulty restraining laughter. The effort made his eyes sparkle. “They suggested – ‘Perhaps something about shepherds.”  
   
Erik laughed. Xavier looked at him and laughed too. After a moment their mirth halted. “All the shepherds are in the trenches,” Erik said. “Of course they wouldn’t see a thing like that. These doctors are all fools.”  
   
“Perhaps I can translate some Vergil with a decided emphasis,” Xavier said after a moment. “They could hardly object to that.”  
   
Erik shook his head. “It’s no good. All the past has to say about war is it’s a lovely thing to die in. Somehow they never manage to have any apt verses for gangrene or trench-foot.”  
   
“It’s all dulce et decorum est,” Xavier quoted. “And ‘if I should die, think only this of  me.’”  
   
Poor Rupert, Erik thought. Perfect golden verses and then those dreadful panicked letters and then – gone. Not even a bullet. A mosquito bite. “That was Rupert.”  
   
“Rupert?” Charles asked. “You knew Brooke?”  
   
“I hovered in his orbit briefly,” Erik said.  
   
“You’re right about the poems,” Xavier said. “I don’t mind the classical element, but the metaphors all seem intended for cheerful Spartans. Not cheerful, I guess, if they’re Spartans. But – you see.”  
   
Erik looked at him. “Precisely.” Something kindled in the air between them. “The old words aren’t any use. We need a modern poetry that’s ugly because if you’re writing beautifully about something ugly it’s a lie.”  
   
“Poetry’s always been a form of lying,” Charles said. “I think it lies least when it says a thing is beautiful. That’s why I try not to write about the war.”  
   
“You write?” Erik asked.  
   
“I think you’d think it was rotten even if you thought it was flowery and magnificent, and I’ve already bothered you too much today, but if – tomorrow maybe, you were willing to give it a look-over.”  
   
Erik shook his head. “Get it now.”  
   
“I’ve already devoured your whole morning,” Xavier said, apologetically.  
   
“I want to see what you write,” Erik said, startled a little by the force of the curiosity.  _It’ll probably all sound like Brooke,_ he thought. _Perfect and golden and tuned within an inch of its life, because that’s the way boys who look like that write if they can write at all. Perhaps he can’t write. Boys who look like that are often the subject of poems but seldom their authors._  
   
Xavier was flushing for no reason that he could tell. “I won’t be a minute,” he said, and then he was gone, leaving the door open.  
   
Erik exhaled for what felt like the first time since Xavier had entered the room.  
   
For a moment he thought of the poem he might write about Xavier. It would be a pastiche of Endymion and he felt with a leaden certainty that it would be absolutely rotten. _Unless he died_ , Erik thought. _You have an uncomfortable penchant for doomed boys. Look at what happened with Tommy. If he died it would be barbed and witty and perfect_.  
   
Xavier came bounding back in with a few sheets of paper and hovered behind the desk as Erik read them. At first Erik read slowly. But then he gained speed and by the end he was elated and muttering the words aloud.  
   
It was good.  
   
It was sickeningly good. It was frighteningly good. He glanced up at Xavier. _It’s better than Brooke,_ he thought. _He has no right to look like that and write like that too. Brooke only looked like that._  
   
“You like it,” Xavier said.  
   
“Good God,” Erik said. “This is the stuff, Xavier.” He couldn’t think of anything less stupid to say. “Sweat your guts out writing poetry,” he said, finally. _This is better than mine_ , he thinks. _People can never tell if it’s satire or not. I’ve always insisted it was a sign of subtlety but really it’s a sign of bad satire._  
   
“Tell me what’s wrong with it,” Xavier said.  
   
This Erik could do. This he was accustomed to doing. “These last lines don’t belong,” he said. “They’re better than the rest of it. You should chuck the rest. If you can write like this there’s no sense forcing us through misheard Rossetti or whatever this is. This is clean and sharp and perfect.”  
   
“More like this?” Xavier said. He settled on the edge of the bed. Erik turned the chair away from the desk so that they sat facing each other. He began leafing through the verses again, reading and gesturing. Their knees touched. Erik ought to have been accustomed to this by now, troop-ships and bars and close quarters with men, but somehow the touch hummed at the back of his mind through all their talk of poetry, like a stop left open on an organ by mistake.  
   
When Xavier stood up he suddenly noticed the bedframe. “What a funny bed they’ve given you,” he said.  
   
Panic clutched Erik by the throat. "It's always been like that," he said. At that Xavier looked at him, uncomfortably direct, and the boy raised a finger to scratch his brow and then let the finger fall.  
   
When Xavier finally left the room felt strangely colorless again. He went to the doorway and stood in it a second watching him walk away. Then he called, “Xavier?”  
   
Xavier turned instantly. “Captain?”  
   
“ _Erik_ ,” Erik said, pointedly. “What was the word? The porcupine word?”  
   
Xavier grinned. “I need an excuse to keep coming back, don’t I?”  
   
\--  
   
Erik sat in the dining-room, pretending to listen to Rivers. Xavier was at the far end of the table next to Summers trying to force more toast on him. Rivers reported that Summers continued to set small objects on fire in his room and no one seemed to know quite where he was finding the matches.  
   
Keep The Home Fires Burning, chirped John McCormack from the Victrola.  
   
The sound was almost physically painful. He had hated the song before he’d even gone to the front. But now, with Tommy putrefying in No Man’s Land between the trenches – with the metallic taste of blood still in his mouth every time he swallowed, as though the world had soured, the music came close to being a personal affront. Who was playing it? It must be the nurses, must be someone who’d never seen the lads lying strewn around the field like so much meat. Someone who’d never felt the leaden weight of the gas mask around his neck, stumbling down the trench–  
   
Though the lads are far away, they dream of home.  
   
No, they don’t, Erik thought. Home slipped into a form of conversation. It was a series of faded photographs you pulled out of your pocket. At best it existed in theory. At worst the war disproved it altogether. Civilian life seemed vapid, vaporous.  
   
There’s a silver lining.  
   
Bloody unlikely. He wanted to find Ivor Novello with his fine slick hair and seize him by the throat and squeeze the life out of him. He wanted to tear him limb from limb. Ivor’s death ought to be dark and barbaric and ugly – bad as Tommy’s --  
   
Erik felt a surge of rage – hot, strange, but curiously calming, like a new element in the atmosphere that seemed to clarify the air, focus the world around him. He glowered at the victrola. It was as though he were flexing a strange muscle again. There it was – the needle. There was a crunch. The needle went shrilling through the record with a harsh crack and the metal arm bent in on itself, and with a hideous screech the music stopped before Novello could turn the dark cloud inside out.  
   
He couldn’t help grinning. All eyes flew to the record and the broken player, hissing and crackling like a demented stove.  
   
Then he noticed someone staring at him. Xavier. There was something in the gaze he couldn’t read. He looked almost – impressed. More than that. Delighted. His eyebrows arched up and his lips parted as though he were about to say something.  
   
That’s impossible, Erik thought. He can’t possibly know I’m behind it. I didn’t even mean to do it. I haven’t been that angry since –  
   
So that’s the trick then.  
   
Xavier’s blue eyes narrowed. Erik stared back at him for a moment. Xavier’s expression of puzzlement and delight was the sort of thing that boys Erik had known, boys perhaps more aware of their own favors, would have paid money to master.  
   
Mouth a little open like that, on the verge of a question— _He always looks as though he’s asking to be kissed_ , Erik thought, and then found himself contemplating more obscene uses for that mouth, and then Xavier seemed to have swallowed something the wrong way, because he was flushing and coughing into his hand and not looking up any longer to meet Erik’s eyes.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time to R some of that ST...

He had been trying not to fall asleep. It had not worked. Now the nightmare caught him and it was worse than before.  
   
He did not bother trying to cross the ledge of ice. He stopped at the edge and looked down. Then the ice began to crack and he was plummeting down and under the ice were dozens of frozen men with blue lips and clammy skin, clawing at him. He felt the ice begin to creep over his own features. Icy knives cut through him. He was a horrible cold thing, a clammy creeping thing, and the world was a field of ice –  
   
It seemed that all along it had been an illusion that he was ever walking above the ice, that any part of him had been quick and warm and real. The world was ended in ice.  
   
And then he was awake and he was screaming. The bedstead broke.  
   
He stumbled out of the nightmare and down the hallway, not knowing what he was looking for, found himself in the hall bathroom, but the ghosts of the night still clung to him with stubborn invisible fingers and the bathroom began to break too. It was happening again and he couldn’t control it, but he could feel it, the metal rasping and twisting like a broken arm. The sink bent in two and the mirror shattered and the faucet twisted into a snake and then uncoiled and hung limp, and he was panting and white-faced and kneeling to pick up shards of glass when he heard footsteps in the hallway.

"Rivers?" he said, warily, trying to calm his breathing. "It's all right. Please don’t come in."

"I'm not Rivers," a familiar voice said, and then Xavier was on his knees next to him picking up glass. Their fingers brushed. "You're not alone," Charles said. There was a strange light in the blue eyes, and Erik suddenly felt that if the whole world were to go dark the last bright place would be Charles Xavier's face. "I'm like you, Erik. It's not only you."

"You can do this?" Erik gasped.

Charles looked at him and then he felt -- it was impossible to describe, Charles' mind was actually inside his mind, he could feel it like a touch, and he heard Charles' voice saying, "No, I can do this," and Charles' mouth hadn't moved.

Little, loquacious Xavier. Like him. My God.  
   
Then he understood where the Apostle Thomas had been coming from.  
   
He had to touch him.  
   
His hands gripped Charles' shoulders and slid up to his face and Charles looked back at him. The look was different -- frank and warm and almost hungry, and it sent something curious and hot curling along his spine. Charles had not looked at him like that before. He knew Charles could read the same expression in his face. Suddenly both their breaths were coming fast and shallow and infinitely loud in the silence of the broken bathroom.

"I'm real," Charles said.

Their eyes met and then he glanced away again, feeling the lust hot and transparent in his eyes. Wrong, Erik, he thought. Not here. Not here.  
   
"What do you need?" Charles asked, and for a moment Erik thought he had only imagined that he'd said something. "Take it," Charles whispered, and then Charles' hand slid up along the side of his face and made him meet his gaze.  
   
"Take it," Charles whispered again. For an instant their eyes locked. Then Erik had captured that tempting warm mouth in his, biting Charles' lip, making Charles whimper a little, and was kissing him rough and hard and shoving him against the tile wall, and Charles's hand slid up under his shirt and along his back and he was doing everything in a desperate rush, somehow needed this, as much as a desperate anonymous fumble in a latrine or the nights when it was only his own hand, and he'd tugged Charles' trousers off and his undershorts down and could feel Charles' hands shoving down his own trousers and Charles' pulse beating rabbit-quick and Charles hissed, "Take it, Erik, please," and then his pants had pooled at his ankles and he bit a kiss into Charles' neck and Charles let out a half-gasp, half-moan, that was not the sort of sound he had ever thought the boy could make. Then Erik had shoved his fingers into Xavier's hot red mouth. The sight of those lips wrapped around his fingers made him think a dozen things at once-- Charles on his knees, dark head between his legs, Charles on a bed with hands braced around his thighs, fucking Charles' mouth -- but this was more urgent than that, he pulled his fingers free and shoved Charles up against the wreckage of the sink and then somehow the sight of Charles' hands bracing on what was left of the metal made him pause, gasping, everything uncomfortably real.  
   
Then he felt almost a tugging in his mind, a door slamming shut somewhere, and his thoughts were eddying back towards the harsh unthinking lust, and he bit Xavier’s neck and Xavier hissed and arched back against him. Xavier’s eyes in the mirror were dark with desire, and Xavier caught his hand again, shoved the fingers in his mouth again, sucked, tongue playing obscenely over the pads, and Erik gasped out, “All right” and slid one finger wordlessly into him, feeling Charles buck back into the touch, eyelids fluttering, and then another, and hissed, "Sorry," but Charles was shoving back, eyes hungry in the mirror, and he was so hard he could barely think, he slid a third finger into Charles, spat on his hand and tugged it hastily along his length and then he was buried hilt-deep, gasping against Charles' shoulder, and their faces in what was left of the mirror looked frankly unfamiliar.

Charles was flushed and panting and his mouth was red and open and his blue eyes were wild, and his own face was a little distorted, eyes wide, lips sore, hair disheveled, teeth bared, and he had ceased to be in control of any of this, it was all violent hot and bestial and he could tell he was hurting Charles by the way Charles' mouth set itself in a tight line and his fingers whitened on the metal. He wanted to kiss Charles, wanted to cover his whole body in kisses and touch him gently and watch his face change and his eyes widen, but instead he gritted his teeth and thrust into him again and gasped, and Xavier was tight and hot and -- he _needed_ this, needed the desperate hot press of flesh and Charles' fingers tightening on the remnants of the sink, the half-animal sound of pleasure Charles was making when he thrust deeper. Then Charles was pushing back against him, and his hips were driving faster into Charles and Charles was grunting, head lolling back, and he was feeling little strange slips of sensation, heat and fullness and sudden unfamiliar waves of hot pleasure when he nudged a certain spot, and Charles was gasping, "Sorry" and he caught his eyes in the mirror and bit another kiss into Charles' neck, thinking _no do that again I want that again,_ slid a hand past Charles' waist, wrapped a hand around his length, and Xavier let out the most gorgeous sound he had ever heard, too loud, and he shoved a hand over Xavier's mouth, and there it was again, _i'm going to --_ _you wanted this I felt you wanting this, wanted to take me like this_ but more than the tangled skein of words, sensations --  Charles impaling himself on his cock, the feeling of his hand on Charles' lips -- different from his own thoughts the way music was different from speech, throbbing and singing a strange hot pleasure through his veins, and then he felt something unclench within himself and came, hard, in a series of gasping thrusts. Charles' seed spilled into his hand and they sagged, stilled, together and what was left of the mirror had fogged so they were invisible again.  
   
Reality broke over him like a pailful of cold water. Suddenly he was aware of everything, Xavier still panting and drenched in sweat beneath him, his fingers still clamped on the boy’s waist. Xavier seemed to realize it the same moment he did. They bent and began hunting for their discarded trousers, groping half-blind. Twice their fingers brushed again.  
   
“Sorry,” Xavier murmured. “Oh God, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have -- I made you -- ” The blue eyes didn’t meet his. Then he was gone down the dark hallway.  
   
\--  
The next morning Xavier wasn’t at breakfast. He hadn’t expected that he would be. But when the boy wasn’t at lunch and didn’t show up in the smoking room after supper he felt his eyes keep flickering over to the empty spot on the sofa.  
   
“They took him in for more observation,” McCoy said.  
   
“Oh,” Erik said. He hadn’t realized how easy his look had been to read.


	6. Chapter 6

That night sleep had been out of the question. Erik sat up in bed holding the pen. Anger, he thought. Get angry enough and there’s nothing you can’t break. He began to hum, “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” in an irate minor key, just to see. He felt a little flare of rage – and then he could feel the metal of the pen, sudden and clear, like hitting the right note by chance on an instrument he couldn’t yet play. It was exhilarating. He bent the pen in half. Silverware, he thought, I have to start smuggling spoons and forks and knives in to practice on.  
   
The thought lost him the pen. Focus, Erik. But he couldn’t, suddenly too excited, wandered over to his window and threw open the curtains to gaze up at the bright coin of the moon. For a moment he wondered whether there were metal in the distant sphere, whether he could lure the luminous alien craters down to hang over the trenches, mirror their moonscape devastation.  
   
That was when he caught sight of the figures moving across the grass. They seemed to have come out of nowhere. Two doctors – he couldn’t remember their names, but he’d seen them about – and – it couldn’t be – why would it be?  
   
Then the figure looked up at his window and he realized he’d been right. Xavier. It was almost as though Xavier knew he was watching. For some reason the thought sent a quick surge of heat to the pit of his stomach.  
   
The feeling of Charles’ mind inside his mind had been unlike anything. It was – he’d never done it like that, but he imagined it would be like taking it, being touched where you’d thought nothing could ever touch you. It was obscene. It was mesmerizing. He wanted to feel it again.   
   
Xavier’s gaze lowered from the window and the little procession made its way into the building. He listened for their footsteps in the hallway. They were not long in coming.  
   
Their voices were hushed but they seemed to be engaged in some sort of argument. He crept over to the door to listen. “That isn’t possible,” one of the voices was saying.  
   
“Then make it possible,” a voice he knew was Xavier’s hissed. “I want to go back to the Front.”  
   
“No one wants to go back to the Front.”  
   
“I can’t stay here,” Xavier said, and there was a curious edge to his tone.  
   
“You’re more useful here,” the third voice said. Erik could hear the menace, wondered whom it belonged to.  
   
Then the footsteps were gone down the corridor.  
   
Erik exhaled slowly. Useful. What use could Xavier possibly be? For a moment he remembered a man in his unit who'd rambled of horrible experiments. But the man had been mad.

 _You're mad now,_ he reminded himself. _Technically speaking. But perhaps you always were. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact._ The line of verse began tramping sullenly around his brain. Sleep came late and fitfully. He kept starting awake, thinking he had heard Xavier's voice.  
   
\--  
   
The next morning Charles was at breakfast, looking paler and a little worse for the wear, like an unmade bed. The boy made a point of not looking at him.  
   
Erik watched him as he ate. When the meal ended he got up and walked over to Xavier’s chair. Several men pushed past him on their way outdoors. Xavier rose, pushed the chair carefully back in and then turned to look at him.  
   
“Are you all right?” Erik asked.  
   
Charles shot him a look that was impossible to read, a muddle of hostility and concern, the sort of look a cat gets when it is deciding whether or not to fight. “I’m fine,” he said, biting the words out with a strange precision. “Why, were you worried you’d broken me?”  
   
Erik swallowed. “Wasn’t suggesting that,” he said. He couldn’t help noticing how Xavier was standing – nervous, as though poised to fly elsewhere – but close, unreasonably close. He wanted to touch him again. His fingers, almost without consulting his mind, reached out and cupped the ridge of Charles’ hip through the rough fabric of his uniform trousers. Almost instantly he withdrew the hand. Charles’ whole face suddenly flushed bright crimson and something sparked up in his eyes.  
   
“That won’t happen again,” Charles said.  
   
It was the first sign of life all morning. It was strangely reassuring, even though he could sense the flood of mortification, and the brightness faded out of Xavier’s eyes almost as soon as he’d noticed it was there.  Xavier pushed past him and followed McCoy into the library.  
   
He was fascinated. He knew he shouldn’t be. This was not the sort of place to pick up boys.  
   
Who was Xavier frightened of? he wondered. The voices in the hallway? Me? Himself?  
   
 _I made you_ , Xavier had said. The words jumped out in startling relief. Made me what? The thought darted nervously across his mind. He tried to think back to the evening, the harsh eddying of lust, the look of desire and -- control -- in Charles' eyes. _But I wanted to. He didn't make me want it, that much I'm certain._ Still the thought was troubling. He paused in the doorway of the library. McCoy was explaining something to Xavier, to guess by the gestures, and Xavier was nodding and -- in spite of how exhausted he looked -- seemed gratified by the confidence. He wanted to go in and see what it might be about, find out what made that slow smile spread across Charles' face.

But then Rivers came up behind him and suggested another walk, and he stifled a sigh and acquiesced.  
   
\--  
   
That afternoon he knew that there would be no knock. He strolled out onto the veranda and settled under a tree and tried to write. It was all the sort of poetry Tommy would have called too Greek. Charles was dreadfully mixed up in it. Soon enough his thoughts turned morbid and he started to think, “He’s not even cold, he still stalks through your dreams, and you’ve already – you ought to be the one who’s ashamed.”  
   
The anger followed. He had been hoping it might. And with it came that curious clarity, the feeling of silence around him in the air. The pen bent. He managed to push it towards and away from him without touching it. Raised it. Lowered it. The pen was floating an inch in the air when he heard a scream unlike any sound he had heard before. It was less a scream than a screech, no cry of terror but a – natural cry like the call of a hawk. But it was too loud to be a hawk.  
   
He let the pen fall and made his way toward the noise. There was a small clump of haphazard trees just beyond the more manicured grounds, and when he came up level with them he could see a young Irishman with coppery hair whose name he couldn’t remember, looking proud but puzzled.  
   
“Was that you?” he asked.  
   
“Yeah.”  
   
“Have you always been able to do that?”  
   
The redhead frowned. His brow furrowed. Thinking with him seemed to be a laborious mechanical process that required the operation of a great number of cogs and while they spun his mouth slowly fell open and hung that way. “No,” he said, at length. “Or if I could I only noticed it since that last show on the Somme.”  
   
Erik nodded. “It’s quite something.”  
   
The boy shook his head. “I think it’s dreadful. I wouldn’t do it – only – it comes as a relief, somehow.”  
   
“You ought to cultivate it,” Erik said.

“What’s it fit for? Near scared the life out of me.”  
   
“It might scare the life of out of Fritz,” Erik said. “It’s worth attempting, at least.”  
   
The boy only nodded. “But you ought to do it further from the castle,” Erik said, turning to go. “It carries rather well."

"Don't want to do it any further," the boy said. "I'm half scared to meet anything that thought it was a mating call.”

Erik felt an unaccountable surge in the pit of his stomach. "I doubt anything would," he said. "The circumstances would have to be intensely peculiar." As he began walking back the images flashed through his mind -- _Charles' flushed face in the mirror, his fingers clamped over Charles' mouth, the burning rush of Charles' thoughts inside his head, Charles gasping, his mouth hot and red and open, the feel of Charles' cock in his hand, the sound he'd torn from those lips --_

And now Charles wouldn't talk to him. What did you say after a thing like that? "Hello" was entirely inadequate. "What in hell was that?" was closer, but no chance of that. You couldn't go back to discussing poetry. At any rate Charles couldn't. He hardly blamed him. And if Charles had been able to see into his mind all this time, if all the time they'd been talking poetry and reading letters Charles had felt him thinking obscene thoughts about his mouth, about wanting to take him like that -- _But he wanted it,_ Erik thought, _as badly as I did. He came to me._

But still it was no use. Charles would pass him in the hall without looking at him.  
   
\--  
   
Charles had taken up his hegemony over the chess board. The new Goliath, Erik thought.  Charles certainly looked more like a David, all wide blue eyes and soft dark hair and a benignly superior expression as he demolished the opponents' pawns. And David had been a poet.

Watching him play was intensely frustrating. Feeling Charles ignore him -- pointedly, like shutting a window when you notice someone staring up at the light in it -- was worse. Finally after a week’s not speaking, sick of Charles darting past him in the hall and getting up before they finished breakfast and avoiding him in the smoking-room, he decided to take matters into his own hands.  
   
“I’d like to challenge,” he said, strolling over to the board, and Charles had to glance up at him then. The blue eyes stared out of the gasping flushed face in the broken mirror. He knew how predatory his own grin was. Charles looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights.  
   
“This ought to be good,” Summers said. “Well, good, for _chess_.”  
   
A small crowd assembled.  
   
 “As a matter of fact,” said McCoy. “I’ve been keeping statistics on the chess. You two have the longest undefeated streaks of any players here, both of incredible and roughly equal length. I doubt one game will give us an accurate sense of who the dominant player is.”  
   
“You’re suggesting an exhibition series,” Charles said. Erik could tell he was trying to keep his face from falling.  
   
“Best of seven games,” McCoy said. “That would give the opportunity to establish a statistically significant lead.”  
   
“What if it comes down to four against three?” Erik said.  
   
“Then we’ll amend it that you have to win by two.”   
   
“That could be a lot of chess,” Summers muttered.  
   
“It’ll be fascinating chess,” McCoy said.  
   
They set up the board. Charles was still adamantly not looking at him. Occasionally the boy would dart a furtive glance at him, but the blue eyes would flicker back down to the chessboard before Erik could read their expression. It was maddening.  
   
Charles seemed always one move ahead of him. By the time he remembered why he had lost both his bishops and a knight.  
   
“Cheat,” he thought. “Two of us can play this game.”  
   
The first thing he thought was the bathroom again. Charles seemed to have prepared for that. The blue eyes met his with a warning.  
   
“Your fault,” Erik thought back. In his mind he shoved Xavier to his knees, and the young man was tugging at the fastening of his uniform trousers, eyes wide and hungry, and he traced a caressing thumb over Charles’ lips – Charles ran his tongue over them almost unthinkingly, and Erik thought to himself, For Christ’s sake, Erik, whom are you distracting?  
   
Charles on his knees in front of him, his fingers clamped in Charles’ hair, Charles making a little choked noise of satisfaction -- I bet he’d look marvelous like that, Erik thought. Charles swallowed audibly.

"Your move," Charles said. When Erik looked down at the board he'd lost a rook. This was not working quite as he had hoped.

 _I've never seen you naked, Charles,_ he thought, _but I think I'd like to, naked and stretched around me and blushing to the roots of your hair, fingers white in the sheets, defiled and willing and –_

He felt rather than heard the rhythm of Charles’ breathing change. He took Charles' queen.

Then he tried something else – they were in bed, his hand tracing along Charles’ chest – he thought the chest would be hairless and pale and soft; his mouth followed his hand and he was kissing a line down Charles’ chest, following the line of dark hairs into more familiar terrain. His fingers traced a map of the trenches – Ypres, the Salient. He planted a line of kisses along the Somme.  
   
 With a feeling almost like a door shutting Charles slipped free of his mind.  
   
After that it was only the matter of a few moves. “Checkmate,” he said.  
   
“Again,” Charles said. He was entrancingly flushed.  
   
“If you like,” Erik said, grinning at him.  
   
This time Charles did look at him, and the gaze was frankly defiant. He played just as well. But there was a certain – expectedness to his moves. They were always the best possible move. It was as though Charles – he found that he was thinking of him as Charles, not Xavier – had committed all the books on How Best To Play Chess to memory. That was not how Erik played. This time the strategies prevailed. But Erik could see openings, weaknesses, failures of imagination. It would be an interesting few games.  
   
When Charles returned the box of chessmen to its shelf in the library his shirt hiked up and Erik could see the marks his fingers had made. He could tell that Charles felt the look.  
   
He felt the blue eyes flicker over to him and then back to the books. The gaze was unnervingly direct, but – closed, somehow.  
   
\--  
The next day’s game was better matched.  
   
“Are we going to talk?” he asked, taking another of Charles’ pawns.  
   
“What about?”  
   
“For instance,” Erik said, grinning over the board at him, “I’ve sent one of your poems to H. G. Wells.”  
   
“Which poem?”  
   
“The best one. “  
   
Xavier took a bishop. The suggestion of a smile flickered over his lips at Erik’s little grunt of dismay. "You ought to pay more attention to what you're doing."  
   
“You never told me what the word was,” Erik said, resigning himself to lose this game.  
   
Xavier flushed, stiffened a little, as though the recollection of more casual acquaintance had struck him as a warning. “I never knew the word.”  
   
“Come off it,” Erik said.  
   
Charles frowned a moment. “Emolument,” he said.  
   
“Really?”  
   
“I swear on my mother’s grave.” Charles’ mouth quirked up a little. He took Erik’s other bishop.  
   
“I thought you said your mother was alive,” Erik said.  
   
“Just as well I can’t remember the word,” Charles said. He stared at the board. He seemed to be trying to decide whether or not to say something. Erik made a deliberately stupid move with his rook. “I wrote her about you,” Charles said, quietly and suddenly, darting a glance around at the few spectators who still lingered.  
   
“I hope you spared some details.”  
   
 _I didn’t tell her how it feels to have your prick in me, if that’s what you mean_ , he heard, and for a moment he gazed aghast at Charles, then darted a glance at the spectators to see why they didn’t seem to be gathering for a court-martial, and then he realized Xavier’s pert red mouth hadn’t moved, and then Charles said, “Checkmate.”  
   
“Thank God,” Erik said. It was going to be a very interesting few games.


	7. Chapter 7

Chess the next day was better. Charles had established a slight lead – three games to two, and Summers had given up interesting chess as an oxymoron and was off flirting with the nurses. But McCoy was still watching, albeit a little less intently than at first.  
   
“I wrote another poem,” Xavier said, moving his first pawn out.  
   
Erik glanced over the board at him. “Is it any good?”  
   
“I was hoping you might tell me.”  
   
Erik nodded.  
   
“It’s in your style,” Charles added, glancing fixedly down at the board. He moved one of his knights. Erik watched the neat fingers toy with the stem of a pawn and wondered whether Charles were doing it on purpose. It brought half a dozen things to mind. He could sense Charles clamming up.

 Of course the poem was good. It was terrifyingly good except for the last two lines, which Erik admitted might be the lines that were most in his style. He tried to tell Charles that.  
   
Charles smiled. “Are you writing, then?”  
   
“A bit,” Erik said, thinking of the abortive recent efforts that were all mixed up with Xavier’s slow smiles and too redolent of Greek.  
   
He thought, _I’d show it to you but I know you’d blush, the similes are all a little off, but you’d spot yourself anyway, I don't know how you've done it already but you're slipping into everything, your eyes and your hair and the sounds you made when I was inside you, even the way you don't look at me now sometimes._  
   
\--  
   
The next morning without any apparent fanfare Xavier sat down next to him at breakfast and he tried to keep from grinning.  
   
At the conclusion of the meal Xavier produced two sheets of slightly crumpled paper and began rereading them, following the lines with a pencil as he read.  
   
“What’s a synonym for ‘radiant and exulting’?” he asked, at length.  
   
“Good God,” Erik said. “What on earth are you writing? Propaganda?”  
   
“It’s for my mother,” Xavier said.

"Propaganda then," Erik said. “How about effulgent and radiant?”

Charles shot him a look. "You don't write your mother," he said.

"I write her every day," Erik said.  
   
The boy was opening up again, almost in spite of himself. No wonder the boy got sent back to Blighty within moments of deployment, never mind the telepathy, he wore his emotions on his sleeve, they brimmed out of those sea-bright eyes. He knew what Charles would have looked like in the trenches; dingy and a little worn-down at the edges, eyes drooping from lack of sleep, mouth wedged into a tight line, but still that fatal openness. Trying to box it up would have been half the struggle. No wonder he wore down so quickly. That was the same thing that had struck him about Tommy.  The openness and the natural laugh that seemed to bubble up from underground until it hit the sunlight. The reproachful smile. The way they buttered their toast.  
   
\--  
   
The next afternoon Xavier came across him outdoors practicing with a knife.  He had taken to humming Keep The Home Fires Burning to himself while he moved things. It was not particularly glamorous but it was effective.  
   
“Erik,” Xavier said, finally. “You’re being very difficult.”  
   
“Don’t see how I’m being difficult,” Erik said. The irritation gave him a very definite sense of the metal and now he flung it in Xavier’s general direction, catching it two inches from his throat. “But you are.”  
   
“That’s excellent control, you know,” Charles said. Erik turned and looked at him. He always had the sense these days that Xavier was trying not to say something. It was intensely frustrating. At once he noticed that Xavier had something metal in his pocket. He probed at the dimensions. Flat. Not a coin, with gears and – Pocket watch. He pulled it out of the pocket and caught it in one hand.  
   
“Give me back my watch, Erik,” Xavier said.  
   
“Make me,” Erik said.  
   
The phrase seemed to startle Xavier a little. “I could,” he said.

"Bet you couldn't," Erik said. Xavier's blue eyes narrowed. Erik felt his legs begin walking over to Charles, hand outstretched with the watch on the palm. Then Charles was panting and had to stop. He was only halfway to him. He took another step and held out the watch.

"You never made me want to give it to you, you know," Erik said, pressing the watch into his palm. Suddenly Charles' eyes met his and they were no longer talking about the watch.

 Charles tried to pull his hand away. “Erik, I know what you think, but you were going to stop and I –”  
   
Erik took another step closer and slipped an arm around his waist. “I wasn’t going to stop,” he said, mouth brushing Xavier’s ear.    
   
Xavier seemed to melt a little into the touch. “I oughtn’t admit that,” Erik muttered. “But you came to me, sudden like that, knowing what you did, and you wanted me to take you rough and quick like that, and I had to have you.”  
   
Xavier’s neck arched a little, as though he were asking to be kissed, and Erik pushed down the collar and found the mark his mouth had left and pressed his lips to it. Xavier’s whole body answered the touch, and then Charles pulled away and muttered, “No, Erik.”  
   
“Why?”  
   
Charles flushed. Erik still had his hand, fingers tracing a line over the wrist, and Charles said, “It was a bad idea,” and then, “I’m not usually like that,” and then, “I can’t control it with you."

Then Charles snatched the watch and was walking rapidly away across the grass. Erik could still feel the ghost of the metal in his hand.  
\--

“You’re letting me win,” Erik said. Charles frowned at him across the board.  
   
“I’m not,” he said. “Honestly I’m not. I wish I were.” He stifled a yawn.  
   
Erik moved a rook. “You ought to worry less about that knight,” he said.  
   
“Surely you don’t think that’s all I can think about?” Charles asked.  
   
Erik shot him a puzzled glance. “You’re protecting it,” he said. “Or is that not what you’re doing?”  
   
“Oh,” Charles said, flushing a little. “Oh. Homophones.”

There was a silence.  
   
“I’ve been thinking,” Charles said at length. “We could use each other. To train. Since we know about each other’s –”  
   
“Peculiarity.”  
   
“Precisely.” Charles drew his lips together and Erik wished for perhaps the seventieth time that the things Xavier did with his mouth didn’t send his mind reeling towards the gutter.  
   
“You’ve been using me to train enough as it is,” Erik said.  
   
“This would be different,” Xavier said. “Platonic.”  
   
“Naturally,” Erik said.  
   
\--  
   
“Enough cutlery,” Xavier said. They were standing on the edge of the grounds in a haphazard clump of trees. Erik had just managed to get the blade of a butter knife wedged into an oak. “Try something more challenging.”  
   
“Like what?”  
   
Then Xavier was grinning. “Let’s go find the golfers.”  
   
They came upon the bedraggled-looking trio teeing off in some long grass. One man raised his club and Xavier shot Erik a look.  
   
Erik caught the club mid-swing and threw it off just a little, sending it waggling down to miss the ball. The man cursed.  
   
“Now you,” he said, and Xavier lifted a hand to his temple and got a marvelously concentrated expression and the man who was swinging the golf club began shaking like a leaf and nearly dropped it.  
   
“What’d you do?” Erik asked, feeling a smile spread across his face without knowing the answer.  
   
“Here,” Xavier said, and Erik saw the golfer’s companion’s dressed in tea-gowns with impeccably coiffed grey hair and painted faces. He glanced over at Xavier. “Not bad.”  
   
The next man raised his club and Erik caught it at the peak of its arc and twirled it in the man’s hands. The man shook his head, recentered himself, brought it back level with the ball, raised it again. Charles caught his eye and grinned, and the men were all mermaids, great grey-green tails flailing about in the grass. The man dropped the club as though it had been enchanted into a snake in his hands. At this Erik could not suppress a grin.  
   
“Vivid imagination,” he said. Xavier laughed. It was a curious rippling laugh that cascaded into a chuckle. It was a good laugh, more solid than the boy looked.  
   
The next golfer raised his club and Erik grinned conspiratorially back at Charles and caught it and began flailing right and left with it, dragging the man’s hands.  
   
“Hi! Watch yourself!” the man’s companions yelled, darting out of the path of the metal harrow.  
   
“I don’t – I don’t know what’s going on!” the golfer was yelling. Erik concentrated a moment, tried to twist the metal of the club out into a snake, couldn’t quite manage it, contented himself with bringing it down to stick in the grass like a flag marking a new continent.  
   
“My club got the better of me,” the man was gasping. His comrades looked petrified at him. One of them said something inaudible.  
   
Xavier laughed.  
   
“We aren’t golfing next to that loony-bin again, Bert,” he leaned over to Erik and quoted. “It’s catching.”  
   
“Good ears.”  
   
“I’m listening with him –“ Xavier said, pointing at the indignant man trying to free his club from the grass.  “I’ve sort of gotten on board his head, if you like –”  
   
Erik nodded. Then Xavier grinned at him again – he hadn’t seen Xavier smile like that the whole time they’d been here – and two of the men vanished and goats that bore them an uncanny resemblance, down to the spectacles, appeared in their places. Erik couldn’t stifle a laugh.  
   
“Bert?” the man tugging his golf club out of the hillside cried. “Richie? What has become of you?”  
   
Then the men were back and he and Xavier were laughing hysterically.  
   
“That’s magic,” he said.  
   
“’S not,” Xavier said. “It’s – I was a bit sloppy on that last one, I forgot to put in most of the hillside and nobody had any shadows. If there’d been anyone here like me they’d have spotted it in in a flash.”  
   
“There’s no one like you,” Erik said. The way Charles looked at him after he said it made him weigh the words out again in his mind.  
   
He had not laughed so much in weeks. Xavier was sunshine and the swift wind between the trees and rippling laughter and the sour looks of men in golfing flannels. He had a definite and increasing urge to kiss him. He would shove him up against a tree and the kiss would begin warm and chaste and then he would slide a hand into Xavier’s trousers --  
   
“Stop it,” Xavier said, finally.  
   
“What?”

“Thinking that. You’ll spoil it.”  
   
“It isn't my fault you won't get out of my head,” Erik said. That didn't sound quite right either.  
   
\--  
   
That night he couldn’t sleep, still too excited. He was gazing out the window again when he noticed the grim little procession making its way across the grass – this time going away from the hospital, first one doctor, then Charles, then the other, a set of dour brackets for the bright phrase, vanishing halfway between the trees and the house, as though they were disappearing into the grass itself.  
   
This time Charles didn’t look up.


	8. Chapter 8

After breakfast, lunch, and still no Charles.

After tea, after dinner -- Xavier had emptied the world somehow, or concentrated it all into his person -- he excused himself and went upstairs to Charles' room and knocked. No answer. He shoved the door and it opened. No one. Charles' things were all still there. Picture of his mother and Charles at school. Charles grinning. Mother looked bored. Charles seemed to be willing himself not to notice. Charles and a series of nannies. Charles with his arms around the shoulders of two young men in boater hats he didn't recognize, looking absurdly pretty. The signed copy of The Old Huntsman.

Then an orderly came down the hall leading Charles and he had to stifle a gasp. Charles was ashen and pale, eyes glazed, looked exhausted. He collapsed onto the bed. The orderly vanished. He seemed not to notice Erik's presence.

Erik knelt at the side of the bed. "Charles?” he asked. Charles' eyes flickered open.

"Not tonight, Josephine."

"Fuck that. You know I don't mean that. What happened to you?"

"I'm assisting the war effort," Charles said, with a grotesque parody of one of his grins that made Erik's stomach twist.

"They're torturing you."

"Only incidentally." Charles shut his eyes. "They seem to have noticed what the war's done to some of us -- at any rate there's a fairly elaborate machine -- and they -- they seem to think I can supply them information on the enemy’s movements. Which it seems I can, only--"

"Does it hurt?" Erik asked.

Charles nodded. "But it's -- I can see more. Touch more. It amplifies -- whatever this is. Generally I'm only good under a mile, but with it I'm -- I can see London, Erik." For a moment Charles' smile flickered back to life, then out again, like a bulb swinging in a darkened shed.

"They've no right to do that to you," Erik muttered.

"If it didn't hurt like that," Charles began, then exhaled very slowly, "it's incredible."

Erik looked down at him. Xavier's face was drawn and white and exhausted. Possessed by a strange impulse he reached down and pushed a dark strand of hair out of Charles' eyes. Without his consciously meaning it to, the touch became a caress, and Charles' eyes flickered open and met his. Erik withdrew the hand.

"I'm sorry," Erik said. "I'm no good at this."

Charles shut his eyes again. "It's all right," he said.

There was a long silence. "I'm sorry," he said. "Charles. I want to help. If I can do something. Without you here I think I'd've gone --" he fumbled for the right words, _something quaint,_ he thought, _from the men, something to make Xavier laugh_ \-- "abso-bloody-lutely fanti."

Xavier managed a weak smile, and in its way this was more frightening than if he hadn't. Erik had the sense that under most circumstances it would have been a laugh. _This is what's left,_ he thought. _This isn't the war, this is the men perpetuating the war and profiting from the war -- they did this to him. To us. And now look at us -- theirs to toy with and break and toss aside like so much trash and --_ He began to be dimly aware of the bedframe twisting, and Charles' eyes flickered open again and Charles said, "Erik, please, I don't want you getting -- try not to, please."

Trying not to was nearly impossible, twisting the bedframe back into shape was excruciating -- _swords into ploughshares_ he thought, _always the trickier maneuver for you, Erik_ \-- but he managed it, somehow, aware that if he looked down he would catch that pained beseeching look in Charles' eyes.

"Thank you," Charles said, and Erik reached down and stroked his hair again, not knowing what else to do. Xavier relaxed a little into the touch, perceptibly, and his eyes shut.

"I'll fall asleep on you," Xavier murmured, after a while.

"Wouldn't blame you," Erik said. He traced carefully along Charles' forehead and Charles seemed to be sliding slowly farther away, down into the strange land of sleep. "Go to sleep," Erik muttered.

"Would you be appalled if I asked you to stay here until I did?" Charles asked, yawning. “God, I sound such a child, only I don’t want to be—”

“Alone.”

Charles' eyes flickered open. Their blue was very dark, and he thought of whole tramloads of analogies -- storm-choked skies, the blue pattern on shattered china, the sickening waters that slapped the side of the ship as the steamers nosed towards France.

"I'd be appalled if you didn't," Erik said. He kept stroking Charles' hair. Finally the rhythm of Charles' breathing shifted _Watching him sleep, Erik? Don't, for God's sake. You're in deep enough already._ Some lines of Byron that he'd conned at school began to sidle down the corridor of his brain.  
"A sailor when the prize has struck in fight,  
A miser filling his most hoarded chest,  
Feel rapture; but not such true joy are reaping  
As they who watch o’er what they love while sleeping.  
 _Love's the wrong word, Erik,_ he thought strictly _but all the words are wrong. He makes them wrong._

It was strange how the old words crept back even in the midst of this new ugliness. Xavier seemed to demand the old verses; there was a potency to them still, or maybe -- _they're love poems, Erik,_ he thought, with some disgust. _This is not the season for love poems, but he turns out that seamy side of your wit, he's a poem an inch._ He traced the curve of Charles' cheek with a thumb and got up, feeling suddenly very tired.

When he made it back to his room the words came tumbling haphazardly off his pen and death was mixed up in all of it, the strange pallor on the already familiar features. "Light many lamps and gather round his bed," he wrote. "Lend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live. Speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet."

 _Save him, Erik?_ he thought. _That's always been your forte, hasn't it?_

Sleep was slow in coming.

\--

At breakfast the next morning he was forcing down some unpalatable eggs when Xavier stepped through the doorway and he heard, "Thank you," clear and warm as a whisper against his ear. Charles' lips hadn't moved. Xavier settled next to him and ate heartily, as though he'd been given a personal shipment of good eggs, and their elbows kept brushing. For once Charles didn't seem to shy from the touch.

"You seem recovered," Erik said, as Charles' fork scraped along his plate.

"Thanks to you," Charles said, not looking at him, bringing the fork to his lips as though more food might materialize on it.

"You looked like death warmed over," Erik said.

"You looked concerned," Charles murmured. Erik felt a strange warm prickling at the edges of his mind, glanced at Charles' face, and thought _Perhaps that's how it feels when he's deciding not to say something this way_ and Charles' sudden flush signaled a bull's eye. _Tell me,_ he thought. _Evidently you're pawing around in there this morning; tell me._

"What do you want with me?" Charles said, very quietly, eyes meeting his.

 _More every day,_ Erik thought, _impossible things, more impossible every day, I didn't know you laughed like that, mostly I'd like you alive and safe and not like last night, anything but that --_ But he couldn't help it, an image was knitting itself behind his eyes, Charles in his bed, Charles waiting, Charles naked, Charles with those hungry eyes again, Charles wanting him, Charles _his_ , Charles in his arms and laughing-- _Not only that,_ he thought helplessly.

"But that," Charles said, and under the table Charles' knee brushed against his. Charles frowned. "I've written something. If you'd care to read it."

"Of course," Erik said.

\--

He settled on the end of Xavier's bed. The room seemed strange in daylight. "I feel as though I've been asked up to see your etchings," he muttered.

Xavier shot him a look. "I'm afraid the etchings in question exist," he said. He fumbled around the desk and passed him a piece of paper. Erik scanned it. It was, predictably, exceptional, all but a soupy middle section that could be done away with entirely. He was uncomfortably aware of how close Charles was sitting; whenever he tapped a word with his pencil Charles' shoulder brushed his.

"This is a surprise," he said, finally.

"What is?" Xavier said. Then he seemed to notice their proximity.

"Charles, you don't have to -- to thank me," Erik said.

"I'm not," Charles said, flushing.

"Oh," Erik said. The knowledge settled warm in the pit of his stomach, like a coin heated in the palm of his hand.

\--

“Hank wants us to help him,” Xavier said. He was standing in Erik’s doorway looking a little furtive.

“Hank?”

“McCoy.”

“With what? Charm?”

“I’m not denying he’s deficient in that,” Charles said, “but he’s like us, Erik. He saw us practicing. He was clever enough to guess. And I – felt around in his thoughts a bit and he’s really quite extraordinary.”

Erik felt a surge of something in his stomach. “Oh, extraordinary,” he said, and his voice had a strange curl to it. Charles looked at him.

“For God’s sake, Erik,” he said. “If I didn’t know better I’d say you sounded – ”

“Then it’s a good thing you know better, Charles,” Erik said, getting up and following him down the corridor.

When he actually saw what the matter was with McCoy, he could have laughed. The man’s feet had transformed into something – prehistoric-looking. Charles said some laudatory things about prehensile limbs and the enhanced skills they endowed a man with, but in the face of those undeniable feet it sounded somewhat inadequate and rehearsed.

McCoy looked a bit distraught, if Erik had to put a word to it, and he breathed noisily all through the interview. “I don’t want to believe that I’m like that now,” he said, finally. “I’ve been hoping they’d go away. I see the way you both look at me now.”

“I think it’s extraordinary,” Charles said. Charles glanced at him with a small grin, and Erik heard, Well it’s certainly not decorative, and for once he didn’t glance back.

“Extra ordinary, meaning only out of the ordinary,” McCoy said. “I know what words mean, Xavier. I don’t want to use it. I want to fix it.”

“You can’t fix it,” Erik said. “What are you talking, McCoy? Use it. It’s got to be good for something. It looks as though it’s useful.”

“It’s certainly not beautiful,” McCoy said. “I just want my feet back.”

“You won’t get them back,” Erik said.

“I’m sure we could think of something,” Xavier said.

“No, Charles. He won't." Erik frowned. "McCoy, it’s a gift. This war is all ugliness and destruction and – if I understood you earlier, you can do things now you couldn’t before. That must count for something.”

“I’m faster,” McCoy said. “I can balance upside down in a tree like a modified ape.” He spat the words out.

“Then do it.”

“It’s uncivilized.”

“War’s uncivilized. It’s a gift of war.”

McCoy led them out off the terrace and into a clump of trees, at a gait so fast Erik could scarcely keep up. Then he’d flung himself up to swing off a branch. “Satisfactory?” he asked.

Erik cocked an eyebrow. “Tell me it isn’t moderately exhilarating.”

McCoy frowned, leaped from branch to branch several times in rapid succession, then plummeted to the ground at his feet. “Moderately.”

Charles had drawn level with them.

“I want you to fix it,” McCoy said, turning to Charles.

“I can’t fix it,” Charles said, swallowing. He glanced over at Erik. “Erik’s right – you ought to try to use it, as long as you’ve got it.”

McCoy looked crestfallen. "No." He walked rapidly back to the house and began tying his boots back on. “There’s other ways,” he said. “I heard, in London –”

“No, wait, Hank,” Charles began, but McCoy ignored him, dashing off down the hall.

Charles looked at Erik for a moment.

“You were right,” Erik said. “Extraordinary.”

“That’s one word,” Charles said.

\--

That night he heard the sound of Xavier’s voice, musical and low, coming from the library. Everyone else seemed to have retired. He walked down the hall and stood in the doorway. Xavier did not see him, intent on the book that he was reading out loud to a convalescent Erik did not recognize, who sat in a chair opposite with bandaged eyes. _Out, vile jelly,_ Erik thought, in spite of himself, and at the reference Xavier’s gaze darted up towards him and Xavier smiled a little ruefully.

He looked questioningly at Xavier and Charles nodded, and he walked in and settled on the carpet at his feet. It was then that he realized what Charles was reading. It was his own book. The words sounded so different in Charles’ mouth – more poetry in them, somehow, the harsh jangling bits sanded out, and at the thought he felt a little self-conscious. He shut his eyes and Xavier kept reading.

There was a fire. There was a subtle influence in a fire. It made him tired and brought to mind the winter evenings in the countryside after a hunt, when he was cold and wet and curiously aloof from the world, when he’d sat gazing into the embers and thought _No one shall ever see any of this_ and _No one will possibly ever know all that’s worth knowing about me_ and felt curiously sad. That was when he had begun to write poems, in the hope of catching someone unawares, before all the veils of politeness and conversation came tumbling down between them again.

And then this war had come, and it had razed all the barriers except the barriers between man and man. You marched beside a man, you died beside a man, but you never got the sense of all the marvelous horrible strange thoughts banging around inside his head.

He had no idea what the sensation was at first. Then he felt it again. Charles’ fingers were in his hair. At first the touch was tentative, nervous, and then gradually it grew more assured, and he leaned back against Charles’ leg and Charles’ fingers continued to stroke, and then Charles’ thumb strayed down along the line of his cheek into a definite caress, and he was a little terrified how easily his pulse began to race.

Charles finished the poem and said, “Do you want me to go on, Scott?”

“No,” the man with bandaged eyes said. “Thank you. I think I’ll turn in.”

Charles got up and took the man by an elbow and led him off down the hall. As he passed through the doorway their eyes met and held.  
\--

That night he fell into the nightmare again, but instead of Tommy it was Xavier standing out on the ice, and Xavier was walking towards him.

“Turn around,” Xavier said, and behind him was a meadow, no ice, and sunshine, and an enormous house, and Erik began to feel something he couldn’t quite place tickling at the base of his stomach.

“Where is this?” he asked.

“It’s mine,” Xavier said, and then, after Erik didn’t say anything, “You’re cold. Let’s – inside.”

Then they were standing in a well-appointed bathroom with a tub with clawed feet and Erik realized he was only wearing a towel.

Xavier shot him a look that was frankly and overtly lascivious, and he could swear that the towel was shrinking. “Come to think of it I could use a bathe myself,” Xavier murmured, and with a start he found that they were both in the bathtub, knees tangled, and Xavier leaned down to kiss him and reached one hand between his legs, beginning to stroke with a fascinated knowing look in his eyes, and Erik felt that strange sensation at the base of his stomach again, and then Xavier had pushed him back against the wall of the tub and was kissing his neck, unblushing and hungry and making Erik groan into his hair with the things he was doing with his hand, and then suddenly it hit him and Erik leaned and whispered into Xavier’s ear, “This isn’t just my dream, Charles, is it?”

Charles didn’t say anything, ran his tongue along the side of Erik’s ear, and Erik was straining to maintain any semblance of control, feeling himself about to melt beneath Xavier’s hand, and he gasped, “I’m not the only one soiling my sheets tonight, am I, Charles?”

Then he couldn’t hold out any longer, gasped, spent himself in Charles’ hand, and when Charles murmured, “No,” he leaned closer, feeling the dream already beginning to dissipate, and kissed the word off his lips.


End file.
